How Michael Palin went from Monty Python star to Britain’s greatest TV traveller

Standing in the centre of Manila for the first moments of his latest TV travelogue, Michael Palin finds himself a spectator of history. It is 40 years to the day since dictator Ferdinand Marcos was booted out of power, and the veteran presenter looks on as thousands of citizens of the Filipino capital march past chanting, “Never forget, never again…” It’s a typical scene-setter for one of Palin’s adventures, bringing us atmosphere and context before he settles down with a collection of striking characters to fill in the colour and culture of a country so different from our own.

But then, in a twist of almost Pythonesque surrealism, Palin goes from observer to VIP guest, summoned to the palace of the country’s heavily guarded President Marcos – Ferdinand’s son, known widely as “Bongbong”.

How has this unassuming Englishman garnered such an invitation? Because the premier, it transpires, is a lifelong fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and wants to talk about the show in general, the fish-slapping sketch in particular. In short, it’s because he’s Michael Palin.

Celebrities turned travel-loggers are ten a penny these days – everyone from Joanna Lumley and Sue Perkins to Bradley Walsh and Stanley Tucci; Michael Portillo in a cerise blazer or Martin Clunes atop an elephant. A decade before Palin came Judith Chalmers, continuity announcer and presenter turned one-woman Foreign Office with 30 years of perma-tanned reports from afar. An honourable mention, too, to the Boughs, with Nesta gamely joining Frank in foreign forays, at least until his spectacular 1988 downfall. But Palin was an outlier: known already as “one of the Pythons” but with no apparent desire to be individually famous, or with any particular interest or background in travel reporting.

One of the many charming aspects of Palin’s multi-faceted success is his humility, such as when he once told me he credited much of the popularity of Monty Python to, simply, “good timing”: “The Beatles split up on almost the day we started, and we had the same feeling as them.” Similarly, his following in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg in 1989 with Around the World in 80 Days came about only after a handful of luminaries – Alan Whicker, Miles Kington and Noel Edmonds – had turned it down (these days just imagine the bite marks left in an agent’s sleeve for such an offer).

But from the off, despite being a comedy superstar, Palin became our everyman, the quintessential Englishman abroad, being waved off by his family at London’s Victoria Station, remarking: “At the very last moment, I remembered to bring a tie. You never know when it might come in useful.”

Such an accoutrement was to prove no help a few weeks later when the poor man became violently ill with diarrhoea while crossing the Arabian Sea in an open-topped dhow. But this setback and resulting white-faced footage only cemented his incarnation as the definitive traveller of the modern TV age.

Thirty-eight years and 100 countries later, in Manila, there’s no tie but a blazer when Palin is greeted by Bongbong in the vast rooms of Malacañang Palace and finds himself the object of a president’s scrutiny. “How do you come up with a skit about slapping each other with fish?” The Python star does his best to explain.

They say that, however far you travel, you can never run away from yourself. Fortunately, Michael Palin doesn’t need to. While he remains ever-curious, explaining, “Most of it’s just listening to people, letting them speak,” it turns out that, even in the unlikeliest of places, people are just as interested in him.

Michael Palin in the Philippines is on Monday 28 September at 9pm on 5.

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